Saturday, March 20, 2004
Things to Hear, Things to Read
Had a lovely time chatting with Jim of Objectionable Content last night at the new residence of Megan of Asymmetrical Information. I was wearing my Corvids T-shirt and was surprised to learn that Jim hasn't yet checked out the new offering from Ken Layne and his merry men. Now don't get all scared off about the "country" tag their music gets because it's country in the way the Rolling Stones are country. So in case you, like Jim, still don't know what you've been missing, click over to Ken's site and have a listen - for free. And then if you have excellent musical taste, you'll probably want to buy a CD from him directly, or through Amazon, CDBaby or another places he links to from the site.
And while I'm plugging stuff I like, here's a book recommendation I was also pushing on Jim. I'm now on the second book of Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series. Hilarious stuff. The first book is "The Eyre Affair" and I only picked it up because it was on the recommended shelf at Partners & Crime in the Village. It's kind of a cross of Douglas Adams, "Back to the Future" and maybe a bit of Luigi Pirandello." Lost in a Good Book" has just come out in paperback and his newest was just released. He's been in NYC this week touring the book shops, but I've missed him thus far.
Friday, March 19, 2004
No 'Peace for Our Time'
Tom Friedman ends his column on Spain's decision to withdraw its troops from Iraq by quoting Winston Churchill's reaction to Neville Chamberlain's fatal Hitler appeasement policy:
"You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war."
Profanity to Insanity
I'm no fan of Howard Stern, but this FCC thing is ridiculous. Yes, I find him offensive at times. And that's when I change the channel. I also find offensive things on NPR, CNN, Fox, ABC, the New York Times, etc. when they report something so poorly that I think it's actually harming the public debate. In that case, I not only turn them off, but tend to talk back to the inanimate device that delivered me the drivel. This isn't rocket science people: if you don't like it, change the station. Why must you demand that no one else listen to it?
Jeff Jarvis has been following the case like a madman, and Tony Pierce has weighed in with his support. Welch also has posted a few things in his own "indecency watch."
The only good thing about this is that they've gone after a big target like Stern, who has a huge following and passionate fans. Everyone will pay attention. It's a much sadder case when they go after a tiny outlet (like they did with KCSB, the student-run radio station at my college) that has a harder time fighting The Man.
And while I'm at it, I should direct your attention to the Student Press Law Center, the nonprofit organization that helps high schoolers and college kids fight the good fight for free speech every day. Looks like it's still run by Mark Goodman, a delightful man who spent hours and hours on the phone with me when I was the editor of my college paper and our staffers were always trying to figure out how to get more documents public, access to more closed meetings and figure out what was really in all those "discretionary funds." We did some great stuff and the SPLC gets part of the credit. If the kids learn young that they have rights to those things - an obligation even - you wind up with better journalists down the line. You can donate to the SPLC here.
Another Reason to Like JetBlue
Nice customer service column at Inc.com about how the JetBlue CEO has a habit of donning an apron and serving refreshments on his airplanes. "I get most of my ideas on flights like this one," (Dave) Neeleman said. "The customers tell me what they want." (link via Evhead.)
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Use Buzznet
M.C. Brown's Buzznet project gets some coverage in today's Los Angeles Times (registration required). I'm an "active user" at Buzznet, where there are already 690 pictures in my gallery. Did I mention it's free?
A few of my favorites:
snow - in blue
empty chairs at Bryant Park
Brooklyn Museum leftovers
Me at Coney Island in February
"Shoot the Freak" human paintball game at Coney Island
Atlas and St. Pat's at Rockefeller Center
season's first snow
Praise the Lord Dental
Fall carriage ride in Central Park
building crumbling in wind storm at Grand Army Plaza
Fleet Street Cheek
Check out this gossipy new London media blog: Fleet Street Blogger. (Link via Welch.)
However, my informed source (cough, married to him) informs me that there are no longer any newspapers of note actually on Fleet Street. They've all moved out, some to the snappily named "docklands." However, the journalists' church, St Bride's, is still there. Oh and you know he mentioned some bars: "the Golf Club, a dim underground room ... also El Vino's, a Fleet Street wine bar of legend, and then up the road a bit there is the wonderful and very old Cheshire Cheese, hidden up an alley and a haunt of Samuel Johnson, among others."
More Top 10s
My pal Doug was inspired by the New York Top 10 list below and came up with his own list: Top 10 Things About Prague. As you might expect, it includes references to a beer garden, night trams, the Charles Bridge and every babicka's favorite grocery shopping experience: the potraviny.
Doug's also linked to it on the group blog Living in Europe and has asked others to post their own list for other cities. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
The Nader Difference
Looks like I was wrong when I said a Nader candidacy wouldn't make a difference. "Pennsylvania is shaping up once again as a critical state in the Presidential race as voters give 44 percent to President George W. Bush, 40 percent to Democratic challenger John Kerry and 7 percent to independent candidate Ralph Nader, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today." (Link via Late Final.)
Attack on London 'Inevitable"
London officials, like New York, are smart enough to know the terrorists will keep trying to hit their city. Sadly, there are plenty of other cities where people think it could never happen to them and they maybe aren't quite as prepared as they could be. Today's headline in the Guardian: "Attack on London is inevitable.) (link via Jeff Jarvis.)
Busted Buses
Gotham Gazette has posted a nice urban planning story about New York transit issues, basically concluding that the city's buses are screwed up and that's why new data show that New Yorkers spend more time commuting than people in other U.S. cities. Initally when I saw those headlines, I scoffed. I'm from California, after all, and a commute in New York is nothing like driving L.A. freeways during rush-hour.
Still, there are some interesting facts in this column from Tom Angotti, who is a professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, City University of NY and the editor of Progressive Planning Magazine. Here are some nice little morsels:
According to transportation expert and Gotham Gazette columnist Bruce Schaller, New York City has the slowest buses in the country. The average speed is about 7.5 miles per hour. The Straphangers Campaign’s Pokey Award for the slowest bus went to the M23, which averages 3.4 miles per hour, about the pace of a brisk walker.
New York City lacks a strong and consistent industrial retention strategy. The city has been rezoning viable industrial and mixed use neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens to encourage new residential development. The jobs in these neighborhoods are being pushed out into the suburbs and beyond. This is feeding a modest increase in long-distance reverse commuting to the suburbs.
At the same time, the city is losing its traditional walk-to-work communities. Mixed industrial/residential areas that are now turning into havens for apartment developers, like Greenpoint/Williamsburg and Red Hook in Brooklyn, and Long Island City in Queens, once had about one-third of their residents walking to work. The current percentage citywide is only about ten percent.
Another problem is that new bedroom communities in the outer boroughs are being built like suburban-style enclaves that encourage auto use. ... The fewer people that use buses, the fewer buses the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will put in service, and the fewer buses in service the more people will be prompted to get in their cars.
NY Top 10 Lists
File this under Better Late than Never. Two weeks ago Charlie at Manhattan User's Guide sent around a compilation of "10 Great Things" about New York lists compiled by a handful of NYC bloggers. I was pretty swamped when the list came out and then got some nasty cold-type virus that has served as my procrastination excuse for not combing through the list properly. If you haven't clicked over to MUG to read the lists yet, you definitely should as they haven't lost any of their freshness. (Part I, Part II) Here's my top 10:
AMY LANGFIELD, amylangfield.comAnd here are my favorites from the others' lists:
1. The Subway
The great utilitarian, liberating backbone of the metropolis.
2. Central Park
The eye of the hurricane.
3. The Great Hall at Ellis Island
You can actually breathe in the fear and expectation still lingering in this room.
4. The Strand
Greatest book store in the world. 828 Bway [12th] 212.473.1452
5. Richard Ruben's Greenmarket Class
Takes you from the Union Square farmers market to the Institute of Culinary Education, where Mr. Ruben guides the class in inventing recipes with whatever is in season that weekend. 50 W. 23rd [5th/6th] 212.847.0770
6. Rudy Giuliani
Despite his flaws, his emotional leadership in the wake of Sept. 11 was remarkable.
7. Dog Runs
There's a reason the viewing areas for the dog runs in city parks get crowded with non-dog-owner onlookers.
8. Crème brûlée at Le Cirque 2000
Like sex for dessert. 455 Mad [50th/51st] 212.303.7788
9. Bowne & Co. Stationers
They used their antique letterpress to make our wedding invitations. 211 Water [John] 212.748.8651
10. Bistro Burger at Corner Bistro
Order it with a McSorley's on tap and you'll get all four food groups: beef, pork, cheese, and beer. 331 W. 4th [Jane] 212.242.9502
Andrew Womack of The Morning News: The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Cherry Blossom Festival.
Ari Paparo of Everything NY: Union Square - Dog run, two Starbucks-es, statue of George Washington, many public bathrooms.
David F. Gallagher of Lightning Field: Park Slope Food Coop - You need to be a member to shop here, which means working 2.75 hours per month, perhaps hauling boxes of tofu around or slicing cheese. In return you get excellent produce and lots of gourmet stuff, very cheap. Optional: Monthly queer vegan potlucks!
Lockhart Steele: Time Warner Cable's DVR - Rivals Listerine Breathstrips as the technology breakthrough of the decade – for about the same price. (Amy's note: We don't actually own one of these yet. MUG wrote about it on Aug. 14 and I thought, hey, I'm going to get me one of those days. Time Warner has a deal where if you bring in your old cable box and swap it for the new DVR, you don't have to pay the installation charge and then it's only about $6 a month extra for the service. But I got a late start into Manhattan on Aug. 14 and decided to pick up the heavy DVR another day. Of course if I had picked up the DVR that day, I would have been stuck on the subway during the blackout hauling around a heavy DVR box. I've been a little skittish about getting the box since then.)
Jen Chung of Gothamist: The New York Times - In front of my door and on my computer. Enough said.
Rosecrans Baldwin of The Morning News: Walking Around Manhattan - The length of 10th Street; St. Nicholas Boulevard; Riverside Park in spring; the High Line; Chinatown, Little Italy, and Soho at dawn; The park by the U.N. in summer; late night coming home over the Williamsburg bridge.
Remy Stern of New Yorkish: Tourists - Finally, what would NYC be without the non-stop flow of tourists in Times Square? And if they weren't here, who else would we get to push around and snarl at without fearing for our lives?
Once is Enough
Inspired by the post below, my husband decided to Google himself this morning and took a walk down memory lane back to the time he wasn't in his Jeep when he was supposed to be:
The news reached El Salvador just after 11:00 p.m.. Shortly afterward a bomb exploded in the parking lot of the Camino Real Hotel, destroying the vehicle of Reuters' journalist Martin Langfield. "The war of the extreme right began on New Year's Eve," Joaquin Villalobos said later.He told me the event got him listed in that year's CPJ report on attacks on the press (mentioned yesterday) for that year -- and I told him one appearance on that list is plenty.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Knowing Too Much
There was a big splashy story on Google in the New York Times Style section on Sunday. There was a nice benchmark-type where-we-are-now quote I liked:
"In one sense, with Google, everything is knowable now," said Esther Dyson, who publishes Release 1.0, a technology-industry newsletter. "We were much more passive about information in the past. We would go to the library or the phone book, and if it wasn't there, we didn't worry about it. Now, people can't as easily drift from your life. We can't pretend to be ignorant."But maybe a better signpost for where we are going can be found over at New Yorkish, where we learn all sorts of facts (via a Google search) about the author of the NYT Google story. Read Googling David Hochman and find out what's on the writer's Amazon wishlist, that he stayed at the Coyote Inn in Palm Springs, that he likes yoga and that he once interviewed his own wife for an article he did for Forbes. Ouch.
Tuesday Quickies
A few things I've been meaning to link:
The Committee to Protect Journalists last week came out with its annual report on the number of journalists killed as a result of their work. The numbers are sobering: 36 killed in the past year (many in Iraq;) while 136 were imprisoned (led by China and Cuba.)
Dan Gillmor, the tech columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, has had some good posts lately about the dangers of electronic voting machines and why they need a paper trail. Also, he's posted the first four chapters -- in draft form -- of his upcoming book in hopes readers will point out what's missing or what's wrong.
Apparently Pres. Bush got a little excited in my hometown last week when he learned that his jobs program might be working because some little stock car company might hire two more (that's two, not two thousand) employees this year. "When he says he's going to hire two more, that's really good news," Bush gushed. "A lot of people are feeling confident and optimistic about our future so they can say, 'I'm going to hire two more.' They can sit here and tell the president in front of all the cameras, 'I'm going to hire two more people.' That's confidence!" (link via Morrie at That Happy Feeling) OK, I found the original story. It's from the Washington Post.
Snowing already here in Brooklyn and it's not even 10 a.m. Looks like a mix of snow and sleet and wind. Very ick.
Strikers Use GoogleAds
The workers on strike from the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal have quite the Web savvy. In January I posted an item about the strike and a little later one of the strikers showed up to post in my comments. Yesterday I was reading a story at the New York Post's site and saw that the top GoogleAd was from the strikers: "Oyster Bar Workers Strike; Customers: We Need Your Support News updates, photos and more." It links to their strike web site.
Bloomberg vs. The Third Graders
Mayor Mike suddenly looks like the playground bully, picking on a bunch of defenseless little kids. But when he runs for re-election, he may find those defenseless third graders have a lot of friends who'd like to reciprocate the beating.
The mayor wants to end social promotion at the third grade, meaning kids who aren't smart enough to pass a reading and math test before starting fourth grade should have to repeat third. Mayor Mike has served up a lot of unpleasant medicine since taking over in January 2002, but this time the methods were more Giuliani-like. Just before the school board meeting last night, he realized he wouldn't have enough votes, so he fired three members (one via a message on her answering machine according to WNYC) and replaced them with people who would do exactly as he said. Here's the lead quote in today's New York Times (where it's the lead story):
"This is what mayoral control is all about," Mr. Bloomberg said last night. "In the olden days, we had a board that was answerable to nobody. And the Legislature said it was just not working, and they gave the mayor control. Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in."
Monday, March 15, 2004
A Little Eastern Bloc Levity
Paul Frankenstein links to a nice little Idle Words essay about living in Warsaw which includes this amusing line: "But by simply adopting the Polish national motto ('it could always get worse'), the prudent visitor can inoculate himself against all manner of disappointment."
My friend Doug Arellanes, meanwhile, offers up the 1977 very-Commie review of "Lord of the Rings," which appeared either in a Polish newspaper or the Czech daily, Rude Pravo, (which means Red Truth, and shouldn't be confused with the post-Velvet Revolutionary paper, Rude Kravo, which means Red Cow.)
Blogads in the Wall Street Journal
On the front page of the Marketplace section: "Blogs Grow Up: Ads on the Sites Are Taking Off." It's all about advertisers taking a shine to Henry Copeland's Blogads strip. Not only was I an early adopter of Blogads, but I think I was the dumbest of the guinea pigs testing the strip for Henry. "If even Amy could get it to work, it must be OK" -- is how I think the theory went.
The WSJ story says Talking Points Memo, boosted by election season, is raking in about $5,000 a month while Daily Kos is around $4,000. Here at Amy's New York Notebook I hit a record last month when Henry sent a payment of about $100. Not bad, huh?
NYCNight Alert
There is a Craigslist posting seeking contributors for NYCNight.com, an e-mail (spam!) that started arriving in my Yahoo account a few weeks ago. Who are these people? "NYCNight.com is the premier nightlife website in New York City. Our 350K subscribers love to spend money and have fun. They're also the hippest 21-35 year olds in the city that never sleeps." Yeah, right. And who are they seeking out to fill copy for this exciting publication? "Promoters...do you throw huge events and want to make them the talk of the town? DJs....do you spin at the hottest clubs and want to tell the world? Or...do you have the funniest story from last night’s big bash and want to give us the dish? Here is your chance."
I guess if it works for Daily Candy, it could work for them, too.
Oh man, check out the creepy music at Adspyre, the Web site for the company behind NYCNight.com. ("We've already done the work for you and tamed the internet. ... ADSPYRE LTD. is the company where other agencies go to learn about online solutions.") The company is run by "Lord" Pesach Lattin ( ... "long been an innovator at the forefront of new media and marketing technology revolution ... has reinvented e-mail marketing ... ) and Tia Fix.
Around the Wall at Variety
When Variety launched a couple of blogs in October, they warned us they would be behind-the-wall, available only to paid subscribers. But apparently that's just not true. Check out Outside the Box (about the weird promotional items Variety gets in the mail,) Bags and Boards (on the comic book industry,) and the snappily titled EEG Report (on the electronic gaming industry.) But oops, The Porning Report died off last week.
Meeting Forgotton NY
A week ago the husband and I met up with Kevin Walsh of Forgotten NY at Old Town Bar, where he was working on an upcoming feature on the oldest bars in New York. Kevin’s an interesting guy with a head full of facts and dates and stories about our favorite city. The old bars feature hasn’t been posted yet, but his latest update (with gorgeous pictures) is on the recent day on the town for the 1930s subway cars.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Bloomberg the Testy?
If Vanity Fair's Graydon "I'll Damned Well Smoke if I Want to" Carter has an ebay account, don't you suspect he'll be bidding on this item to send as a gift to his friend Mayor Mike "No Smoking! I Really, Really Mean it" Bloomberg? It's a genuine 1899 antique photograuve titled: "Anti-Pipe Smoking William the Testy." From the description: "William the Testy, Dutch Governor of New York, rails against the evils of tobacco ... the constituents are none too impressed and continue puffing their long pipes." Still only $9.99. Go get 'em, Gray!
New Wi-Fi at Brooklyn Museum
I have a list of about 15 things I've been meaning to post during the past week, but have absurdly short Internet attention-span lately, so instead of doing it all as one concise quickie roundup, I'm going to dribble. So as the Brits say: Mind the dribble. The Brits do say that, don't they? Dear?
The Brooklyn Museum will debut its gargantuan made-over front entrance on April 16. The new plaza will feature a "performning" fountain, a giant "stoop" entrance, spots for public performance, its own subway stop, and free wi-fi.
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